Francisco Franco, of franco.Kernel fame and several other root applications, has just released a new media gallery browser for Android: Focus. Designed by our very own Liam Spradlin (#halleliam), Focus brings a big, erm, focus on design, usability, and efficiency. It's decked with Material Design elements and animations, but it still keeps a unique look and approach to image, gif, and video viewing.

Focus' differentiating feature is that you can see all of your images, literally ALL of your images, from the app's main screen. No need to delve into submenus, open folders, go back, and try again until you can find that one cat photo you took three months ago. Photos are organized by collections, which seem to follow the folder hierarchy on your phone and SD card, and thumbnails are scrollable horizontally to display every media item a folder contains.

There's a big Samsung event in New York City next month. It will probably be where the company announces its next-generation Galaxy Note series - though they seem to be a little early this time around, the latter half of the year is when Sammy likes to bust out its big phones. We've already seen some convincing photos of two phones identified as the Galaxy Note 5 and Galaxy S6 Edge+ (a super-sized version of the S6 Edge without the Note line's compulsory stylus). Now we're seeing even more of the former.

Google Photos version 1.1 didn't come with much in the way of changes, and the tradition looks like it's holding true for 1.2 as well. But hey, sometimes we like minor tweaks just as much. So let's go over them, and then you can rush to grab the APK.

What's New

For starters, there's the ability to easily add individual photos to albums from the drop-down menu. Here's a before and after shot.

Left: Old, Right: New

And when you're inside of an album, you also have the option to set an image as the album cover.

It's easy to hate on Instagram. It's not just that most of the photos have user-applied filters. The photo-centric social network has capped images at 640 by 640. Even if your phone can take a decent shot, it only gets scaled down when you share it with the world.

But now the site is rolling out support for sharper photos on both Android and iOS. Users will be able to upload and view images at a resolution of 1080x1080. Here's the word from Instragram Co-Founder Mike Krieger.

The new unlimited upload function in Google Photos is undeniably generous. But the old saying that your mother taught you, "if something seems too good to be true, it probably is," would seem to be in effect. Android Police has received reports from multiple users that photo uploads from the desktop and various mobile apps have hard data restrictions, suddenly cutting out in the middle of the upload process after users pass an unspecified data threshold.

The standalone Photos app was released to the public during last month's Google I/O conference, finally completing the separation with Google+ as rumors (and facts) had long suggested. While the new Photos app was widely accepted as an improvement in many ways, it also lacked many of the enhanced editing features that had made the old version so useful. Unfortunately, installing the standalone Photos app effectively hid access to the version built into Google+. That was probably a pretty good sign about what was to come. With the latest update to Google+, users who have stuck to the old version will be warned that it is not long for this world.

So you were at a party or on a trip, and you want to share the photos of the event with everyone else who was there. Better upload them, make an album, send links, and so on. Right? Wrong! Or so says Facebook. The new Moments app lets you create synced albums that are shared only with the people you choose so they can view and save the photos.

Google's Camera app isn't exactly feature-rich, at least not when it is compared to alternatives offered by OEMs and many independent developers. Of course, that may be one of the reasons it is fairly popular – the interface remains simple and the features that did make it in, like Photospheres, are pretty cool. After looking through the latest update, it looks like Google is working toward another major feature addition called Smart Burst, and it might just become the best way to take photos of your friends.

Disclaimer: Teardowns are necessarily speculative and usually based on incomplete evidence. It's possible that the guesses made here are totally and completely wrong.

A new update to Google's Maps application is out, but the wait for offline navigation must go on. This is a relatively minor version bump, so we're not going to see the big features mentioned at I/O, but that doesn't mean there aren't still some pretty good things in this release. We now get to enjoy a new photo gallery view, car rental bookings will be shown, and there are a few pleasant improvements in Settings.

What's New

New Photo Gallery View

Left: old photo view, Center: new photo gallery, Right: new single photo view

A few weeks ago, Google made some subtle changes to the interface for uploading photos for locations you had visited.

We have already posted a pretty thorough preview of the features coming with the new Google Photos app, but that doesn't mean Google didn't save a couple of surprises for IO. The big bombshell is that, starting later today, users will be able to upload an unlimited number of photos and videos for free. If you weren't using Google as your primary source for photo archiving, this news may give you reason to reconsider.

Your pictures and videos won't be compressed into oblivion either, they will be stored at up to 16MP for images and 1080p for video.